- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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Hello army people,
I have a book coming out soon* and there is a bunch of army poo poo in it. The book is an alien first contact story set in Kurdistan and it's pretty fun. I could really use an expert reader who can talk to the little details of how infantry circa 2013 would communicate with each other, complain, command, and fight. I figure cribbing off NATO publications from the 1980s is not going to work out well. I promise the book is good, you'll enjoy it. If anyone's interested, or if you can recommend someone to me, please shoot me a PM!
Sorry for busting in to your professional space with my stupid writer stuff.
*soon in publishing time, it'll hit shelves in late 2023
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Feb 9, 2022 16:57
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Jul 27, 2024 07:50
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- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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Have a random CSM drop in and yell at someone about their sideburns.
This one isn’t for Black Library I’m sorry
police that moostash
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Feb 9, 2022 23:28
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- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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Posting in the open will maximize your results, but I understand if you don’t want to.
If you really don't mind me making GBS threads up the thread with my drafts I'd love to ask a few questions. I'll probably still need army guys to read the manuscript as a whole to point out things I don't know to ask about. For ex, recently a vet told me that the cool high speed low drag operator tactical code you always hear in movies is nonsense, and in a real fight people are mostly swearing and yelling poo poo that sounds like Halo callouts.
Plus I have no idea how stuff like radios work - does everybody get a little walkie talkie thing, is there just one guy with a big radio, is it both, who gets to talk to the airplanes, etc etc. You can see in this passage I'm kind of just winging it and or working off PR brochures:
quote:Erik leaps out of the plane with Anna strapped to his belly.
The world rushes up at them: total sensory shock after hours inside a gunmetal tube. Like stumbling out of a corrugated drain pipe into the Amazon.
Erik scans the sunrise landscape for threats—can’t see much, except for smoke from a pileup of destroyed armored vehicles down by the valley mouth, Russian BMDs—but the sheer green of it dazzles and him.
This is Eden. Not the Eden of ripe fruit and nude lounging, but the Eden of forbidden trees and flaming swords. It is dawn in Kurdistan, and the light comes slow over the Qandils to the east, onto stone and water and snow and grass. The mountain that towers over the valley is a vast icy whiteness, a vertical lake.
“Told you it was nice,” Anna says, through the bone mic wrapped around her throat. Anna, like Erik, like all his troops, wears a two-way digital packet radio on her vest, connected to a tactical headset with voice-activated and ring-switch transmit modes. These are the best radios Erik has ever been issued: low-SWAP, powerful enough to talk to aircraft directly overhead, flexible enough to shift between the necessary unit, team, and support networks, and fancy enough to tie into the HAVE QUICK II encrypted channel used by military jets. The ad-hoc MANET mesh protocol they’re programmed with supports up to two hundred nodes in the network. Clayton supplied them. They’re not what Erik would’ve chosen (who wants a voice-activated radio on a battlefield, when everyone’s screaming and huffing?) but they’re nice. When networked with bigger radios in the Globemaster’s cargo hold, they might even talk further than a mile.
What they can’t do, even with those bigger radios, is broadcast beyond the valley. Without satellites, there is literally no way to contact backup except relaying messages between aircraft. They are depending on a daisy-chain of Air Force planes to talk to bases in Iraq and Turkey.
“Yeah,” he says, through his own mic. Anna is a warm, calm shape pressed up against the front plate of his armor. “It is pretty.”
It is maybe the most beautiful landscape Erik has ever seen. God, look at it! The village curls up beside the river. The whole valley basks between two arms of the mountain, soaring, snow-capped, summer melt streaming down through lush forest and grey stone, through earth the color of pine and tea, through black hard rock. The shadows of high clouds move across the landscape. There is no sign of life at all. Not even sheep.
His radio pops. Everything that comes through is blipped and jagged: EMP afterglow, loving up even these premium radios. “Majestics, this is Rune One, flight of two F-16s. Our IP is ten kilometers west of the valley. We have four B61s and eight JDAMs. We are using MGRS coordinates. Station time two hours, over.”
That’s the air support. A pair of jets from Incirlik Airbase in Turkey, topped off with gas from the same tanker that refueled their Globemaster. They’re carrying tactical nuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs. Just in case.
“Copy you, Rune, this is Majestic Zero Six.” Erik is on Team Zero, the command unit, and has the traditional ‘six’ callsign for a unit commander. “Glad to have you up there. Frequencies and map grids as fragged. Our controller’s call sign is GAINER. Majestic inserting now. Out.”
Would an infantry guy say 'as fragged'? Are the call signs remotely correct? Would fancy special forces be using personal radios like this? Could you even talk while free falling, or would the mic just be picking up wind? Am I overthinking all this for what's basically a sci fi technothriller?
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Feb 10, 2022 00:53
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- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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HF radio is a good call. All the satellites are dead for plot reasons (aliens)
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Feb 10, 2022 02:43
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- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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Hello army thread. Quick book research. Would anyone ever refer to someone by their pay grade? Maybe as a put-down? Like if you wanted to remind a petty officer that you (a master sergeant) outrank him, would you possibly call him 'E6'? Or is this nonsense and you would just call him by his rank or name.
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Nov 12, 2022 19:10
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- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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I'll just give the context from my stupid book (on store shelves next autumn wow!!!!) and you can tell me if it lands the way it's supposed to, which is to say 'don't forget I outrank you, DEVGRU dude.'
Bolded the exact line so you don't have to read all my loving  if you don't want to
quote:
He grabs the first military guy he sees outside—because he figures Erik would’ve left someone loyal to watch him—and says “I need to brief the unit. President’s authority.”
The guy’s name flash reads GARCIA. He’s a fellow chicano and, correctly in Clayton’s estimation, doesn’t give a gently caress about their racial solidarity. “You’re not the President, Mister Hunt. You’re a White House staff member. If you want to give orders here, you better issue a policy directive to Admiral McRaven at the Pentagon. Please follow me to your billet. Major Wygaunt wants you under observation.”
“No.” He’s not going to get loving arrested. He is going to fix this. “You’ve been seconded to Task Force MAJESTIC by USSOCOM, Admiral McRaven commanding. I am a representative of the President, who is supreme commander of the United States military, including McRaven, including you. Constitution of the United States of America, Article II, Section 2, Clause 1. The President dropped the bomb on Japan by direct order. The President dropped the bomb here too. It was my order, but it was on his authority.”
“That’s fine, sir. But I have orders to escort you to a CHU for observation.”
A CHU is a containerized housing unit and Clayton really does not want to be containerized, housed, or, for that matter, united. He wants to get into Blackbird. “Do you need me to walk you through the legalities? Fine. In 1863 Chief Justice Grier established that if war is initiated by a foreign nation, which I presume includes motherfucking aliens, the President is bound to to accept the challenge without waiting for legislative authority. In wartime the President has the power to take any measure which will avert a disaster that could lead to the defeat of the nation, and there I paraphrase FDR as quoted to me by the President.” That’s a lie, but what the hell. “That includes making me his god drat proxy in the field. That includes making me a god drat five star general if he wants to. He didn’t, but only because he didn’t think it’d be necessary. He can do anything he wants, and because of that I can do anything I want, right up to ordering you arrested for failure to obey a lawful general order or regulation, namely listening to me. Do you understand?”
“Sure,” Garcia says. “You can take it up with the Major. Please follow me to your billet.”
“I will call the loving president on the phone.”
“SATCOM is out, sir.”
“Not my SATCOM,” Clayton bluffs. “I’m wired into the aliens. Do you want me to raise President Obama to speak to you directly? While he’s managing the greatest crisis in the history of our planet, bar none?”
Garcia looks back at him, narrow-eyed: are you bullshitting me? “You have comms?”
“Hey,” someone behind Garcia says. “What disaster leading to the defeat of the nation?”
CIASAD operator Skyler Nashbrook unpeels himself from whatever zone of denied knowledge he was lurking in (behind the container dorm, Clayton supposes). “gently caress,” Garcia mutters. Clayton knows for a fact that Garcia has worked with SAD dudes before, during Delta Force’s opeations arround Baghdad. “Nashbrook? We’re taking Mr. Hunt into protection. Major’s orders.”
“Why?” says another guy. Mike Jan, the DEVGRU hotshot, who must’ve been loitering around waiting to see what happened. “It sounds like Mister Hunt’s in charge, Master Sergeant.”
“Major Wygaunt’s in command, E6 Jan.”
“Major Wygaunt grabbed twenty dudes at random and hosed off east with the Kurds,” Nashbrook says. “He’s no longer in the picture. And if the Deputy National Security Advisor has orders from the President to avert something big, I think we better listen. What disaster leading to the defeat of the nation, Mr. Hunt?”
The three MAJESTIC operators ring up around Clayton like gunfighters looking to draw. Four-horned night vision goggles and plated body armor and weapons that imply, in all their Piccatiny-railed modularity, a post-industrial approach to warfare. These are not the helmeted GIs of old war movies, citizen-soldiers who’ll go home to marry their girls in South Dakota once the Nazis are whipped. These are artisanal, professional killers, as customized and specific as the legal briefs Clayton wrote to justify Obama’s assassinations.
The reason this quote is so loving long is that I'm curious about what you, army NCO guy, would do if the Deputy National Security Advisor started giving you direct orders. He works for the President, but he's not a member of the Cabinet and has no military rank, so the consensus among people I've asked is "I would obey my CO's orders and tell the Deputy National Security Advisor to take it up with my CO".
I left the last paragraph in cause I think it's cool
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Nov 12, 2022 20:17
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- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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Now that's what I've been looking for!
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Nov 13, 2022 03:04
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Jul 27, 2024 07:50
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- General Battuta
- Feb 7, 2011
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This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
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Google something like "US Army command board". Every company level unit and above has one of these that goes straight up from their unit up to the President. Everyone knows exactly who's in their chain command all the way to the top.
How does this read to you? Frankly more detail than the reader probably needs, but...
quote:“No.” He’s not going to get loving arrested. He is going to fix this. “Maybe you’re unclear on your unit’s chain of command. I get that, with how fast things have been moving. Let me clear it up.”
“I know my command board, sir.”
“Do you?
“Yes, sir. I’ve been seconded to Task Force MAJESTIC by USSOCOM, Admiral McRaven commanding. I report directly to my team commander, Major Wygaunt, who reports to LTG Votel at JSOC, who reports to Admiral McRaven USSOCOM, who reports to Secretary of Defense Hagel.”
Did I miss any necessary steps in there? Is that implausibly few links in the chain?
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Nov 13, 2022 23:34
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Feb 9, 2022 16:57
